A robot that folds itself up and walks away

In just four minutes the “origami robot” folded itself up and crawled away like a crab, fulfilling a dream that took a young Canadian scientist to Harvard University.

“It folds up and walks away completely on its own,” Michael Tolley, a native of Kingston, Ont., now at Harvard’s Microrobotics Laboratory said Thursday as the robot stepped onto the international stage.

The robot, shown coming to life in a video released by the journal Science along with a report on the “self-folding” machine, is generating plenty of buzz about “real-life transformers” that could spring to life on search and rescue missions, IKEA-type furniture that could put itself together and low-cost self-assembling robots that could sweep your steps or entertain your cat.

“Our big dream is to really make the fabrication of robots fast and inexpensive,” says team-member Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The idea of 24-hour community robot shops that could design self-assembling robots in hours and sell them for just tens or hundreds of dollars “is not that out of reach,” Rus told a media briefing.

This image provided by the journal Science shows a self-folding crawling robot in three stages. In what may be the birth of cheap, easy-to-make robots, researchers have created complex machines that transform themselves from little more than a sheet of paper and plastic into walking automatons.

The robot unveiled Thursday does away with nuts and bolts, and turned to nature and origami for inspiration.

“We all begin life as single sheets of cells that fold to develop complex organs,” says Tolley, who studied at McGill University in Montreal and Cornell University, before heading to Harvard three years ago to pursue his dream of designing machines that assemble themselves.

There he teamed up with another young scientist Sam Felton, who turned the idea into reality. Their creation is the first machine to start out flat, and then come to life as a 3D crawler that can walk and turn without assistance.

They made the robot with easy to find materials that cost less than $100 — two sheets of paper and two sheets of Shrinky Dinks – a children’s toy made of “shape memory polymers” that hardens when put in the oven. The tricky part was coming up with the 3D design which they etched onto the sheets of polymers and a flexible circuit that dictates where and when the robot should fold.

There is also a microcontroller — “the brain,” says Tolley, and two tiny motors that make the robot move. Batteries supplied the power to heat the polymers in key locations, enabling the insect-like robot to hinge and fold into shape. Once the folds cooled, making the robot stiff, the microcontroller then signalled the robot to crawl away.

The team built three robots, but only one managed to walk. A single hinge failed in the other two. But 82 of 84 hinges folded properly, which Tolley and his colleagues say is not bad for an experimental model.

The beauty of the technique is that it is flexible – the 3D-design programs are as easy to change and edit as documents on a computer. And Tolley says future robots’ “brains” and “bodies” could be changed and designed to fit the job.

He and his colleagues envision self-folding machines being deployed, as needed – satellites that could assemble themselves in orbit, machines that could be slipped flat into a collapsed building, and assembled once inside. They say they might also be a boon for manufacturers and consumers interested in “IKEA-style furniture that assembles upon arrival.”

Robotic expert Alan Mackworth, at the University of B.C., says there are other multi-purpose robots under development that are more like “shape-shifting” transformers.

But the origami robot stands out because the concept appears to be so versatile and could lower the high cost of producing robots, says Mackworth, who built the world’s first soccer-playing robots. “It’s a breakthrough in terms of easy to layout and easy to manufacture using flat technology which then springs to 3D life,” says Mackworth. “That’s a really intriguing idea.”

He says researchers are exploring several different ways of making robotics less expensive and more flexible. “It is not clear yet which is the one that is going to win,” says Mackworth, “I’m not sure this is it, but I am really excited to see the scientific exploration of the possibilities.”

Researcher Anqi Xu, at the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill University, sees the self-folding robot as a “research milestone” that will lead to more competitive pricing of industrial robots and greater access for individuals to produce robots at home.

Tolley, who received a three-year post-doctoral fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to pursue robotics work in the U.S., says he might eventually return to Canada but recently accepted an assistant professor job in San Diego.